Pro-Palestinian students protest at Columbia University in New York City. Photo: Reuters/Jeenah Moon

In blistering remarks, the president of an Israeli university criticized international peers for “giving more protection to pronouns” than to Jews, amid the lack of condemnation in institutions of higher education for the brutal Hamas assault on Israel’s southern communities on Oct. 7.

Professor Daniel Chamovitz, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, joined the heads of eight other leading Israeli institutions in signing a letter calling on their global counterparts to unequivocally condemn Hamas, which they described as a “nihilistic” terror group that “shares no values with any Western academic institution.”

In an interview with The Algemeiner, Chamovitz contrasted the treatment by universities of Jews in Israel, as well as Jewish students on campuses in the US and Europe, with that afforded to transgender students.

“For some reason Jews are not considered to have the same rights as any other minority,” Chamovitz said, acknowledging that gender pronouns should be respected in academia and elsewhere.

“But if a professor can be disciplined for not using the correct pronoun, don’t you think he should be disciplined for saying Jews should be thrown out of Israel and killed?”

The letter — signed by Chamovitz and the presidents of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and several others — noted “a false equivalence between the actions of a murderous terrorist organization and a sovereign state’s right to defend its citizens.”

“Any attempt to justify or equivocate Hamas’ brutal and grotesque actions is intellectually and morally indefensible,” it went on.

College campuses have become “breeding grounds for anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments,” which are largely fueled by a “naïve and biased” understanding of the conflict, the presidents said.

Chamovitz told The Algemeiner that he was “shocked and outraged” by the response of senior university officials, and in particular presidents, to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and the resultant, ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian terror group.

“It never occurred to us that there would be any problem in condemning a murderous attack by a terrorist organization that targeted infants, babies, children, dancing students at a peace concert, without making some kind of moral equivalence to Palestinians,” he said.

“We’re hearing it’s a complex issue. What is complex about condemning infanticide?” he said, asserting that the response seen on campuses is “what we expect to see in the University of Tehran.”

He described oft-repeated chants of “from the river to the sea” — a slogan widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel — heard at his own alma mater, Columbia University, as “outright support for the murder of Jews.”

Chamovitz dismissed arguments by university officials that they were upholding the principles of freedom of speech, saying the language heard on campuses in the weeks following the attack constitutes incitement.

“Freedom of speech does not protect the [university] president from taking a stand,” he said. “I cannot imagine a campus in the US that would have allowed a Ku Klux Klan rally following [the death of] George Floyd.”

According to Chamovitz, the current discourse, which “lacks any intellectual integrity,” is antisemitic in nature.

“It’s antisemitism when the response is only saved for Israel or Jews,” he said. “You see nothing like this about the actions in Syria, nothing like this about the actions of the Chinese against the Uyghurs. You see nothing like this about the response to Turkey and [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan. You see nothing like this about what’s going on in Yemen. You see nothing like this anywhere in the world except the condemnation of Israel. And that’s what makes it antisemitism.”

Chamovitz described most of the pro-Palestinian voices on campuses as “beautifully naive” who are looking for the next cause celebre. “Most of them don’t even know where Israel is. They don’t know what Gaza is. They don’t understand that there’s never been a Palestinian state ever in the history of the world.”

He ended on a more optimistic note, saying that the letter, and a similar one from two weeks earlier, was having a small but noticeable impact. “I hope we’re seeing a watershed moment, a moment in the history of higher education, where the pendulum will start to swing back to intellectual rigor, to true examination, and not to knee-jerk reactions.”

Debbie Weiss is a freelance writer based in Israel.